Being the Belle of the Ball: Online Resources for Literacy Coaches

by Brenda Power

My husband and I have never gone out for a big night on the town on New Year’s Eve. We’re not social animals to begin with, and our early-to-rise habit means midnight is usually way past our bedtime. But when we sit home and watch the fireworks explode all over the world, the ball drop in Times Square, the glittery evening wear and champagne toasts . . . well, we can’t help but feel like we’re missing out a little.

I used to feel that way about the web, too. Who has the time to surf for hours, or join and be a part of dozens of online communities? The demands on literacy coaches these days are enormous, and the web sits there glittering, with promises of free support, guidance, and solutions for literacy coaches. Yet who has the time to find them? Too often, what starts out as delight at discovering an intriguing new resource online quickly fades into irritation and discouragement when a few clicks later you find yourself mired in some ad-infested quagmire, reading a sales pitch for some cheesy vocabulary program. There are fantastic free resources on the web for literacy coaches, but you often have to wade through a lot of junk to find them.

If you feel like you have been missing out on what’s available online, here are some suggestions to get you started in exploring some of those great resources for literacy coaches. The resources are quality web links culled from a free weekly newsletter I publish for literacy leaders worldwide. Over the past year, these are the sites that were the favorites of my subscribers. Depending upon your role, you might share these resources with colleagues in mentoring sessions or over an online school bulletin board, or you might use them yourself as you plan and design professional development sessions. It’s a sure bet there are one or two that will make you feel like you are finally the belle of the Internet ball, too. Happy surfing!

Books and Authors

Author Name Pronunciation Guide
If you've ever mumbled your way through the pronunciation of an author's name, you'll want to bookmark this website—it's a blog focused solely on the correct pronunciation of authors' names. And it's the authors themselves reading their names and explaining the origins, so you know it's accurate.

BookMooch
Of all the online book-swapping services, BookMooch is probably the most useful one for literacy leaders. It uses a point system rather than one-to-one exchanges. It's a great way to clear out the books on your shelf you aren't reading (or found disappointing).

Bookwink
Bookwink is a terrific web resource with video previews of children's books and young adult literature. It's great for kids who are visual learners and need a little more background information for understanding books (as well as teachers who need some quick information on new titles).

Class of 2K9
If you're wondering what the next big thing might be for young readers, you may just discover it at this site. The Class of 2K9 features children's and YA literature authors with their first books coming out this year. It’s always fun to get a peek at what’s new and to experience vicariously the joy of real authors seeing their first books in print

Invite an Author
Scholastic offers a comprehensive planning guide for author visits, with everything from author contacts organized by geographic regions to checklists for coordinators.

ReadWriteThink Calendar
ReadWriteThink publishes monthly calendars packed with author milestones and links to literary resources on the web. The site is a joint venture of IRA, NCTE, and Thinkfinity.

Summer Book Lists from Reading Rockets
Reading Rockets never disappoints with its resource compilations—its web links for summer reading preparation include tips, booklists, and research summaries.

What Should I Read Next?
This is a fun site if you are growing impatient with waiting for your favorite author to publish another book. At What Should I Read Next? you type in a favorite title and author, and the search engine gives suggestions for closely related books you might enjoy.

Classroom Resources

Free Rice
Wouldn't it be great if someone created an online game that builds student vocabulary in a way that has kids clamoring to play? And wouldn't it be great if we could contribute to solving the problem of world hunger? Free Rice combines these two worthy (if disparate) goals. Each word defined correctly builds your tally of grains of rice donated to poor communities, and the game is designed to scale the difficulty of the words up or down depending on your responses. This feature allows students of almost any age or ability to enjoy it.

Freecycle
It's spring cleaning season in homes and schools, many of which are in the midst of a tight budget cycle. The Freecycle nonprofit organization is a terrific resource for schools looking to recycle materials or pick up some free used books, materials, or furniture in their areas. You simply type in your location, and you're linked with local recyclers.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
This is one of those brilliant freebies on the web that make you instantly feel smarter—a "periodic table" of visual literacy. If you're confused about the difference between a "radar chart" and a "concept fan," you can click on the related links and view examples. This is a useful site to bookmark for reference when you're designing graphic organizers, with over fifty different visualization methods provided.

Princeton Vocabulary Minute
The Princeton Vocabulary Minute is great, goofy fun—catchy quick tunes which teach words related to different themes. The "minutes" are sorted according to age appropriateness (from K to 12), and the downloads are free.

Wordle
Wordle is a fun tool for word study—you copy and paste in any text, and it makes "clouds" of key words. You can choose from a variety of colorful options for displaying the words. This would be an interesting tool for use in content studies to display key words in a nonfiction text and to talk through main ideas or concepts.

Professional Resources

Concept to Classroom: Assessment, Evaluation, and Curriculum Redesign
Thirteen, the web-based resource of WNET in New York, has an online self-paced assessment course on the "backwards planning" model of curriculum development, featuring Heidi Hayes Jacobs. This is all part of the "Concept to Classroom" series of free multimedia professional development offerings.

English Companion Ning
Social networks online couldn't be more popular, and new tools are available to help literacy leaders harness the power of these networks to foster discussions around reading and writing instruction in their own schools and districts. A Ning is one example of an online social network and resource bulletin board you can design and tailor for curricular discussions in-house. If you want to browse a Ning in action, Jim Burke has created the English Companion Ning for literacy educators.

Playlist
This recommendation comes from the teenage kids of the Choice Literacy staff, who turned us on to a website with an amazing amount of free music. Our first thought was teens + free music on the web = something totally illegal, but we were pleasantly surprised to discover this site is legit. Playlist scours the web for legal music (from artists' official sites, promotions, and approved blogs) and allows users to create mixes for streaming of favorites. If you have web access at your school and can stream music, you can create a playlist of festive tunes for background music at literacy celebrations of any kind. We've found all kinds of obscure tracks from favorite artists here.

Podcasts & Videos
If you're beginning to explore video and audio resources on the web for teachers and students, the free video and audio podcasts from Reading Rockets are a terrific place to start. Features include video and audio chats with favorite authors, as well as advice from education experts and videos of best practices from classrooms.

Teachers’ Domain
Teachers’ Domain is an online library of more than 1,000 free media resources from the best in public television. These short digital videos, podcasts, and lessons are sorted by grade level, topic, and content area. Registration is required, but all the materials provided are free. There is plenty available for literacy educators, and the site is especially strong in science and math.

Teampedia: Tools for Teams
If you're always on the hunt for team-building activities and icebreakers for meetings, Teampedia is a site you may want to bookmark. It includes dozens of options for everything from name games to diversity exercises.

Summer Programs and Family Involvement

Beyond Fun and Games: Tips & Resources for Summer Programs
If you're in the midst of designing a summer literacy enrichment program at your school, the Northwest Regional Lab and Bank Street College of Education have created a planning guide which includes links to over a dozen high-quality resources on the web.

Buddy Project
The Indiana Department of Education's Buddy Project has a great summer resources page for teachers and literacy coaches, the "Top Ten Ways to Help Parents Prevent Summer Brain Freeze." Besides an amazing number of links, the page includes a terrific simple parent newsletter template.

Parent Involvement: Keys to Success
The National Center for Family Literacy has worked with the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center to produce a wonderful series of podcasts on family involvement. These free 7–10-minute programs include listening guides and transcripts, and would be great to highlight in school newsletters or for staff discussions of family literacy programs.

 See also “Summer Book Lists from Reading Rockets” in the Books and Authors section above.

Technology Tools

Adobe Photoshop Express
Many teachers wish they had access to the editing features of Photoshop but can't afford the steep software price or learning curve for its more complex functions. There is good news—the free Photoshop Express has been launched on the web. It includes the most common features from Photoshop, plus a hefty amount of free storage space. You can give it a test drive here.

Picasa
It will be interesting to see if Photoshop Express can compete with Google's Picasa, the free photo editor and on-line storage service which I've used for the past couple of years. Picasa requires a Gmail account (also free), but couldn't be easier to use when it comes to posting and sharing albums or slide shows. I use the simple fixes like red-eye correction and cropping all the time.

Scratch
Scratch is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's web initiative to build computer programming skills for students and teachers, and it's a delight to play with the materials that it provides on the web.

Searchme
Move aside, Google. If you are a visual learner, you are going to love the new "Searchme" search engine. Type in any phrase, like "literacy coaches," or an author, such as "Jane Yolen," and up pops a stack of actual web page images, rather than a linear text-based list. There are also icons below the search box to narrow your findings. The engine is still in beta testing, but you really have to try this one out to appreciate the WOW factor!

Stixy
I'm still getting the hang of using Stixy, a free virtual bulletin board tool, but I'm already seeing that the possibilities for literacy leaders are almost endless. If space is tight in your school, and your staff is weighted down by too much email, this is a wonderful resource for posting links to professional development articles, short graphic organizers and protocols, even photos from open house or projects on the web for your teaching community.

Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools for Young Learners
T.H.E. Journal (on technology in education) recently posted the “Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools for Young Learners.”

Brenda Power is a former professor at the University of Maine and senior editor at Stenhouse Publishers. She is the founder of Choice Literacy (www.choiceliteracy.com), a web-based multimedia K-12 professional development site. Brenda is also the editor of The Big Fresh, a weekly newsletter for literacy leaders with over 26,000 subscribers in 80 countries throughout the world.

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